The latest report from analytics company Mixpanel provides plenty of insight into how Americans use their phones and tablets. Using 17 billion Web and mobile “actions” collected each month, the firm split up its report based on three locations: California, the Tri-State Area, and the Heartland.
Gaming is the most popular activity, Mixpanel found, particular in the afternoon and early evening as the working day draws to a close. The second most popular category for apps is health and fitness, and these apps are particularly popular in California. Over in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, meanwhile, e-commerce and gaming activities start up as early as 5am or 6am.
“One of the most fascinating things we saw was the serious jump in mobile activity after lunchtime,” co-founder Suhail Doshi told TechCrunch. “Web leads the way during morning work hours, but dips in the afternoon — in fact, Web activity drops off at the same time that mobile activity really starts to dominate. From about 1pm to 6pm, all of the action is on mobile.”
A posting on Mixpanel’s own blog has more details. Social app use, for example, tends to spike at the start, middle and end of every day, while there’s also a jump in e-commerce app use right before bedtime. If you like to browse eBay before nodding off, you’re not alone.
New Yorkers tend to turn in around 10pm, much earlier than Californian users who are still tapping away at their smartphones and tablets beyond midnight. “For those of us who just geek out on this sort of thing (shout out to sociology majors worldwide), the data paints an interesting portrait of three regions of the United States,” concludes the blog post.
